


Galaxies

by soteriophobe



Category: White Collar
Genre: Altered Mental States, Burglary, Darkfic, F/M, Head Wound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-19
Updated: 2012-06-19
Packaged: 2017-11-08 02:38:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/438222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soteriophobe/pseuds/soteriophobe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He is struck by the sudden-but-certain sensation that he isn’t Peter Burke at all; that he’s merely watching a man named Peter Burke crawl pathetically through a series of consequences that he can no longer do anything to prevent.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Galaxies

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt: "Peter with a head injury" - this turned out…um, a lot darker than I expected. Be warned. 
> 
> Also: I listened to [this](http://youtu.be/e3fqE01YYWs) while writing it, and…I think it would enhance the fic to listen while reading it? Not so much mood "music" as mood "sounds" (it's NASA's recording of what Jupiter sounds like), but. FYI! :)

**  
**

 

Strangely, it isn’t the pain that wakes him – it’s the trickling. That crawling, antlike sensation of something slowly moving over the planes of his face. His mind feels distant and hazy, like a smoke-filled pool room, and he smacks instinctively at his forehead with his hand, in order to shoo away whatever might be accosting him.

_ That’s _  when he feels the pain.

It is bone deep and aching, and for a moment overwhelming, sharp enough to slap him into awareness. He’s on the floor of his living room, and it’s freezing cold. There’s a whispering sound, and fear sucks the air from his lungs –  _somebody’s here, who’s there_  – but within a moment he realizes that it isn’t whispering, it’s nothing more than the wailing sound of winter wind, blowing through his open front door.

He moves to sit up – it takes him three tries, and even the third barely gets him there. He stares at the door, at the staircase, down at his lap. Dots are appearing on the left leg of his pajama pants –  _one, two, three, four._  They are glistening and perfectly round and – in the grey light of his home at night – black. They seem to be synchronized with the throbbing of his head, which is incessant in its knocking, pounding all the way through him like a second heartbeat.

_ five, six, seven, eight.  
knock, knock, knock, knock. _

Blood. It must be blood, dripping from his forehead, soaking into his clothes.

He raises a hand to his head and then hisses and pulls it back instantly as knife-sharp pain shoots through him. Forcing himself to try again, he brushes his fingers over the wound at his temple, allowing a gasp of pain to tear itself from his throat. The edges are ragged, and the fissure between them is bone-deep. He feels suddenly nauseated at the thought of probing further, at the possibility of finding fractured bone there. He draws his hand away sharply, wiping his wrist tenderly over his eye to clear blood from his vision. His movements feel suddenly slower, stiffer, like the air has thickened.

Things are starting to fall into place. He was lying on the floor. The door is open. He’s been hit in the head – hit hard. A tectonic swivel of his upper body allows him to take in the room somewhat. Everything seems sooty and indistinct in the near-darkness, but he can make out that the TV is gone, at least. He can see loose wires snaking across the floor that used to be connected to things – and he deduces that, surely, whoever took the television went after other electronics as well.

He could almost laugh – a burglary. That must be what’s happened. How…ordinary, how cliché. Sometimes he forgets that he lives in New York.

The wind yowls, and his amusement turns to sudden frozen terror as it sinks in that he’s alone. He’s alone, in his pajamas, and it seems to be the middle of the night. Where’s Elizabeth? Is she in San Francisco? He can’t remember. Everything that has happened up until now seems to rest on some kind of thin white horizon that he can only squint at, it’s all too far away to make out.

Oh god, let her be in San Francisco.

Fuelled by the urgency of terror, he grabs feebly at a table leg and tries to stand – only to topple over backwards, his already-pounding head landing hard against the wooden floor.

Stars dance before his eyes, as though he can see right through the damn ceiling, as though he’s looking at the sky.  It’s hypnotizing, almost, like a siren song inviting him into the comforting nowhere of sleep, blackout, death.

He resists – he has to, he has to.

Standing or walking are obviously out, but after some gentle struggling, he ends up on hands and knees and crawling slowly forward, attempting to ascend the staircase. Before him, he can see more blood dripping from his head, marking his trail like breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs to trace his way back, breadcrumbs to lead him home. Black and shining – like marbles, like planets, like stars. Life, life leaking out of him, dripping faster and faster, fraying the edges of his vision. He needs more time. He needs to know if he’s the only one here.

It’s not until he reaches the landing that a tidal wave of nausea hits him and he doesn’t even have time to turn to the side – all of his insides are just suddenly outside and he’s heaving and heaving. Every time he retches it makes his head hurt, and every time his head hurts it makes him retch, and he’s completely at the mercy of the circularity. Eventually he rolls onto his side in exhaustion, an acrid scent clogging his nose and a foul mess of vomit ruining the expensive carpet that El so carefully chose.

_ El _ .

He has only five stairs to go, but it feels like Everest. He coughs weakly, choking on some kind of clear fluid running down the back of his throat and out of his nostrils, rolling back onto his hands and knees and shuffling forward – sliding up one hand at a time, then one knee, and then one hand, and then one knee. Over again, over again.

_ Left, right, left. Left right left. Good soldiers keep marching. Keep marching.  
Stars on the carpet, planets, breadcrumbs. Too many now, falling fast.  
Throbbing, knocking, the knocking in his head.  
Blood, breadcrumbs, blood. Onetwothreefourfive. Sixseveneightnineten.  
Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there?  
Left, right, left. _

He thinks that when he reaches the upstairs hallway, he’s conquered the worst of it. He can’t imagine that there’s anything harder yet to come. But that’s before he collides with a limp, furry mass that’s lying on the rug just outside the guest room.

_ Sachmo _ . “Sachmo?”

All of the stars and planets have rushed out of Sachmo, have collided and exploded and are soaking through the floor. Someone has taken the fur at his throat and pulled it apart, almost like they were trying to slip inside of him. Almost like they were cold, and they needed the shelter of his warmth. But they didn’t get in, and Sachmo’s insides came out all-at-once instead of bit-by-bit like Peter’s, and now Sachmo isn’t Sachmo anymore. He’s as missing as the television, another stolen something. Gone.

What’s dripping down Peter’s face now isn’t blood, it’s tears (and blood, too -  _contamination, dilution_ ) – and he calls out, even as he crawls over his dog’s body and tries desperately to remember anything that happened that day, that month, that year. Desperately tries to remember where his wife is.

“ _Elizabeth?!”_

His voice does not even sound like his – it is barely louder than a whisper, for all the force he’s throwing behind it, and it sounds…different, wet. There’s a confirmation in it that makes him uneasy, a knowledge that he doesn’t have conscious access to.

When he crawls into the bedroom he smells gunpowder, and finds his service weapon on the floor. He doesn’t know what to think – who fired it, and why? Thinking at all is getting harder, and he is struck by the sudden-but-certain sensation that he isn’t Peter Burke at all; that he’s merely watching a man named Peter Burke crawl pathetically through a series of consequences that he can no longer do anything to prevent.

He rolls over and lays back on the floor and feels his stomach and head rock and beat uneasily, warning him,  _not much time, ticktockticktocktick._ It occurs to him that ticking is a sound that comes from both clocks and bombs – is he lurching toward a detonation? What’s waiting for him, on the bed?

The bed, he knows, is where he needs to be. If Elizabeth is here, she’ll be on the bed. And so he rolls over again and drags himself toward it. His knees give out halfway, but he keeps pulling with his arms, grabbing at the floor and lurching himself forward.

He never makes it to the top of the bed – by the time he gets there, he has only enough strength left to grab hold of the bedclothes and pull them from the mattress. He hopes to wake his sleeping wife – or else, to pull down sheets and blankets and nothing more.

God, please. Nothing more.

He pulls at the bedding, and there is no startled shriek. Which means Elizabeth isn’t sleeping there, he didn’t wake her. For a moment there’s relief – like an ocean rushing through him, taking all of the sickness away, numbing the pain.

But then there is that trickling again, and all over him this time – over his arms and legs and torso, as though the blankets were full of insects. As though the sheets were saturated with blood. And when he looks down at himself: blackness. Sticky, dripping blackness that is slick like oil, that shines in the light, that is all over him. It smells coppery and sweet and makes him want to retch again.

As the last of the blankets fall: a sickly  _thud_. And he knows.

Elizabeth hits the ground face-up, not far away from him. Unlike Sachmo, her face and throat are intact – but there’s a wormhole where her heart should be. Peter crawls toward her and stares into it, and it stares into him, and he can see the galaxy on the other side. Silence enough to drive the stoutest of men mad. Infinite, remorseless darkness. No stars.

His howl is half-drowned by the sound of sirens approaching his open door. 

  
  



End file.
